Stuffing Recipes

Thanksgiving week is here! Today, I hope the medley of dishes I selected will help you find the perfect Thanksgiving stuffing / dressing recipe for your dinner table. There are a wide range of flavor combinations, using ingredients from cornbread to polenta, fruit and herbs, and even sausage.

Turkey may be the center of the show, but it’s not Thanksgiving without stuffing. So this year, dress it up! (I couldn’t resist )

I developed this new stuffing recipe when I had leftover polenta croutons I had fried for making salad. The preparation is the same as for bread stuffing. I flavored the polentastuffing with earthy ingredients such as brown mushrooms, chanterelle mushrooms, sun-dried tomatoes, red, orange and yellow bell peppers and marinated artichokes.

This stuffing version is perfect if you have gluten-inloterant guests on Thanksgiving. And you won't be missing bread, either. Also, you could serve it tamale-style in corn husks to keep it warm.

If you're Vietnamese, you've probably heard your mom say "tội chết" ("dreadfully sinful" in Vietnamese) in regards to wasting food. The lesson was definitely hammered into me, and now that I'm an adult, I intend to follow in my mom's footsteps and teach the same values to my daughter.

I love Acme brand green onion slab bread. It's very flavorful, moist and delicious. I went a little over-board buying 4 loaves at Costco. I made panini sandwiches the day before and had one left-over on the kitchen counter. Today, my goal was to come up with a creative way to use it all. I made stuffing using the onion bread with ground beef, artichoke hearts, tomato paste and mozzarella cheese. I moistened the bread with beef stock I had stored in the freezer. It makes a wonderful one-dish meal once the little casserole dish is heated and broiled in the oven. And if the slightly stale bread didn't have green onion in it, I could have made pain perdu (french toast) as well!

We had a little bread left-over from the Superbowl party, and instead of wasting it, I turned the stale bread into a delicious side dish. I added plantains, water chestnuts and green beans, then finished the dish with crumbled goat cheese. I paired the plantain stuffing with veal scallopini.

The trick to making good cornbread stuffing is to cut the cornbread into bite-sized cubes and then to sear them a bit before adding them to the vegetables and stock. The reason for this is that cornbread is much more crumbly than croutons, and will fall apart if not treated beforehand.

I made my cornbread dressing with commonly used winter and root vegetables, such as carrots, turnips, celery and button mushrooms to keep it very simple and not overpower the homemade cornbread itself. Cornbread is after all the star of the show. You can also repeat the flavors from the cornbread in the stuffing itself. Roasted jalapeño, bits of corn and cheddar cheese would work, though I would use shredded cheese in that case.